We are the least rebellious generation of college students in history. It’s not that young people have stopped doing subversive things in new and ever-changing ways, as “sexts” and pranks posted on YouTube doubtlessly demonstrate.
It’s just there aren’t many repercussions if we rebel. In fact, thanks to the countercutural-youth revolution of the late 1960s, we’re encouraged to do so. But how can we be such amazing dissidents if everyone else is, too?
So blame your parents or the hippies of the 1960s, if you must, but also blame the country for capitulating to youth culture like no other era in American history had before.
When those bra-burners and longhairs overthrew “the system,” they jettisoned the idea that people should age with dignity and follow social norms only to substitute a new regime every bit as rigid and unyielding as the one they deposed, where young people must rebel in a continuous, unfulfilling loop.
So challenge authority. Challenge everything, even if it’s something you like. Participate in constant upheaval. And never, ever age gracefully.
Oh, and we try — boy, do we try. But nothing shocks any more. So we ramp up our game and tattoo our eyelids, we ingest new drugs, we pierce unheard-of regions, we create lurid videos, but people have seen it all by now: what we think are crashing waves of rebellion are barely even ripples.
Mores have shifted and vanished, and the thrill-seekers in the audience are looking for something better, more achingly original and crazy, than we could ever come up with.
There have been several surveys that detailed how people predict today’s children will be worse off than adults currently are. A large part of this pessimism has to do with the poor economy, but another reason is we dread getting old and being “uncool.”
It’s a bummer to imagine aging in a youth-obsessed culture. Look at all the baby boomers that play video games, read comic books and join Facebook. They aren’t growing old without a fight, but at least they got to pick one.
In his book “The True Believer,” Eric Hoffer explains the process of revolutionary movements. When a group overthrows one ideological system, all they do is set another system in place. Once the new group establishes its rule, they don’t seek to innovate or change but to maintain the status quo.
And we are maintaining what the permissive, perpetually adolescent counterculture set in place, every time we allow our parents to buddy up to us, wear our clothes and play Guitar Hero with us.
Or, as Neil Postman says in his book “The Disappearance of Childhood,” “Without a clear concept of what it means to be an adult, there can be no clear concept of what it means to be a child.” I’m not sure if this confusion of roles is what the hippie leaders envisioned decades ago, but I imagine they’re satisfied with the result.
Sadly, every time a 14-year-old slugs down beers with his or her parents, that’s not another young person transgressing against society. That’s another score for the “cool” parent, still sticking it to the man.
Unfortunately, it’s too late for us to become rebels. But if we suck it up and grow up — eventually — and act like the adults many of our parents refuse to be, then our children will once again gain that perverse thrill, that adrenaline rush from rule-breaking, that has been denied us so often. Consider this maturity “rebelling against rebellion,” if it helps.
Or we could do nothing and let them become as lame as we are.
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